OLORON.
“On the afternoon of October 17, 1952, Yves Prigent, school superintendent at the Lycée de Oloron-Sainte-Marie in southwest France, observed a large cylindrical object slightly inclined from the horizontal moving slowly over the town.”
As the objects departed, the witnesses noted that a fibrous, spider-web-like substance was falling slowly from the sky. The substance — known in UFO research as "angel hair" — coated trees, telephone wires, the Lycée's roof, and the surrounding fields. Observers handling the substance reported that it sublimed away into nothing within a few seconds of being touched. By evening most of the deposit had disappeared. Photographs were taken of the deposit while it was still visible.
A nearly identical event occurred ten days later at Gaillac, France, on October 27, 1952, with similar formations of objects and a similar angel-hair fall. The two events together became among the most-cited "angel hair" cases in the global UFO record. Investigators including French researcher Aimé Michel and astrophysicist Pierre Guérin documented witness statements at both sites within days of the events.
Subsequent analyses of "angel hair" deposits in other cases have produced varied results: some samples have proven to be ballooning-spider silk, some have apparently dissolved before laboratory analysis, and a few have shown unusual silicate or boron content. The Oloron and Gaillac samples were not preserved. The two cases are included here as historically central French sightings that introduced the angel-hair phenomenon into the formal UFO record. They are also part of the broader French wave of 1954 (which extended into 1952 in some classifications).